Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
Dec. 13, 2007
LIFE IN southern Israel is unbearable. Since last January, on average, 6.3 mortars and rockets have been fired from Gaza on southern Israel every day. As Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i warned the heads of the communities around Gaza last week, due to the improvements in the Palestinian arsenal since Israel vacated Gaza two years ago, the Palestinians now field missiles and rockets with extended ranges that place 130,000 Israelis under threat of missile attack.
Wednesday, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi made clear that if Israel wishes to secure its citizens there is only one thing it can do. It can conquer Gaza.
In a speech at Tel Aviv University, Ashkenazi explained, "It is impossible to defeat a terrorist organization without eventually controlling the territory. The good situation in Judea and Samaria is the result of our control over the area and we will not be able to achieve victory in the conflict [in Gaza] simply with indirect fires and attacks from the air."
Presumably Ashkenazi made this point Wednesday morning at the security cabinet meeting. But apparently, he was no match for his competition.
Squared off against Ashkenazi was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Livni warned her colleagues that securing southern Israel will destroy the peace process. If Israel secures the south, the Arabs and the Bush administration will get really mad. And "moderate" Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will turn his back on the peace process and reunite his US-trained Fatah forces with the Iranian-trained Hamas forces. Livni's message was clear: The government must choose between security and the peace process.
Livni won the argument. The peace process won out against the security of southern Israel.
The Olmert government's preference for process over substance is not unique. Indeed, it is malady shared by governments throughout the free world. The philosophical foundations of this malady are similarly common ones.
THE SEPTEMBER 11 attacks on the US intensified a dispute that had been brewing since the end of the Cold War about the definition of rationality. The two warring factions in the debate, which has raged throughout the free world, can be referred to as the rationalizers and the rationalists. Each side has given its own definition of rationality and those competing definitions have formed the basis of the camps' competing policy prescriptions for contending with the threat of Islamic terrorists and their state sponsors ever since.
The rationalizers include politicians like Olmert and Livni and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and security and policy apparatuses like the CIA, the State Department, the Foreign Ministry and their counterparts in Europe.
The rationalizers define rationality as susceptibility to foreign pressure and willingness to be appeased. According to this view, if your antagonist is willing to negotiate with you, then he is rational. And since he is rational, he is capable of being appeased. And since he is willing to be appeased, he isn't really your enemy.
The US intelligence community's National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities and intentions is a textbook example of the rationalizers' view. The NIE, which asserts that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 as the result of the program's exposure and the international scrutiny that followed, concludes that "Teheran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs." And since Iran is rational, the NIE recommends that the US and its allies make Iran an offer which entails "some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways."
The rationalizers' view of rationality is alluring for two main reasons. First, its essential argument is that the West is solely responsible for determining whether the world will enjoy peace or suffer the ravages of war. If Western states cough up a proper package of concessions, then the terrorists and their state sponsors will negotiate with them. If Western nations refuse to make the necessary concessions then the terrorists and their state sponsors will attack them and the nations of the West will have only themselves, and their obstinacy to blame.
Beyond that, since the Arab and Islamic world's rationality is solely a function of Western will, the ideology of jihad which informs terrorists and their state sponsors is immaterial. As far as rationalizers are concerned, there is no reason to close down jihadist Web sites or indoctrination centers. Indeed, there is no reason to challenge the validity of jihadist doctrines and values as all.
This view too, resonates in the NIE. The report makes no mention of the fact that Iran's regime was founded on the values of jihad. It ignores the fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters believe that by fomenting Armageddon they can hasten the coming of the Shi'ite messiah and bring forth an era of Islamic global domination in a world in which the US and Israel are but bitter memories. Had the NIE taken these ideological views into account, its authors might have noted that it makes perfect sense for the ayatollahs to be pursuing nuclear weapons.
But taking the Iranian regime's ideology, values and aspirations into account would involve crossing the lines into the opposing rationalists' camp. For rationalists, it is rational for a state's policies and actions to reflect and advance its values, aspirations and beliefs. As a consequence, it is essential to understand and confront those beliefs, values and aspirations.
Just as the rationalizers' views are attractive because they place all the power to determine issues of war and peace in the hands of Western nations, so the views of the rationalists are unattractive because they assume that the free world cannot alone determine the course of events. It cannot influence a society's adherence to jihadist beliefs and aspirations. The most it can do is take actions to prevent jihadist societies from acting on their beliefs.
When Ashkenazi explained that the conquest of Gaza is the only way to secure southern Israel, he was representing the rationalist camp's view of rationality. Since the Palestinians overwhelmingly support the jihadist aim of destroying Israel, it is rational for them to attack Israel for as long as they can. Since Israel cannot change the way the Palestinians understand the world and the meaning of life, the only way it can protect its citizens from murder is by taking away the Palestinians' ability to attack.
PERHAPS THE strangest aspect of the rationalizers' disparagement of the importance of ideology is the lengths they go to in order to ignore jihadist ideology on the one hand and appease it on the other. Agents in counter-terror units of the FBI, for instance, are discouraged from studying the Koran. Their chiefs argue that only a tiny minority of Muslims in the US and worldwide ascribe to a religious-supremacist interpretation of the Koran which upholds and encourages terrorism, slaughter and war to the death against non-Muslims and therefore what the Koran says is irrelevant.
Yet if it is true that only a tiny minority of Muslims think that Islam is a supremacist political as well as religious creed, then the rationalizers should treat the actual jihadists with contempt similar to that which they exhibit towards white supremacists. After all, doing so shouldn't bother the rest of their co-religionists who reject their views. But the opposite is the case.
FBI agents undergo Islamic "sensitivity training" by people who are themselves the subjects of their counter-terror investigations. US military personnel at Guantanamo Bay are forced to wear gloves when they touch copies of the Koran belonging to their jihadist prisoners.
More disturbingly, in their rush to placate this irrelevant tiny minority of jihadists, Israeli, US and European officials willingly trounce their core values of the rule of law and freedom of expression. In Israel, Israeli Jews who build homes without permits are prosecuted to the full limit of the law and ejected from their homes. Israeli Arabs who have built entire towns illegally are ignored by authorities in the interest of avoiding diplomatic consequences or stirring up passions.
In the US, one can stand outside the White House and burn the American flag without fear of criminal charge. But if a person draws a pig on a copy of the Koran in a public library, he is liable to find himself under arrest for committing a hate crime. And in Europe, you can participate in a demonstration invoking Islam as you call for the destruction of Britain or Holland or Demark without fear of legal action, but if you publish a caricature of Muhammad in your newspaper, you may find yourself the subject of a criminal probe and forced into hiding for promoting racism.
In Israel, it is difficult to convince people that the ideology of jihad is unimportant. But the rationalizers have two other ways to convince the general public and their political base that they are right to ignore the enemy's actions and intentions and concentrate on efforts to appease. First there is the fear factor. Given the overwhelming nature of the Arab and Islamic world's hatred of Israel and the Jewish people, Israel's rationalizers defend their preference for imaginary peace processes over security by arguing that Israel cannot afford to fight a war. Far better than facing that hatred on the battlefield is the option of preemptive surrender. As the rationalizers argue, if Israel shrinks into the 1949 armistice lines, builds a big wall and hides behind it, then maybe the Arabs will forget that we're still here and leave us alone.
Politically there is the fact that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party was founded on the view that territory has no defensive value and that preemptive surrender is a reasonable national strategy. To acknowledge that territory is important or that surrendering territory to your enemy strengthens your enemy and weakens you would involve admitting that Kadima's founding principles are all wrong. So Olmert and Livni and their associates maintain the fiction, do nothing to secure southern Israel and seek to transfer Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to Fatah terrorists.
Since September 11, the rationalizers have won most of their policy battles with the rationalists and the results of their victories have been both ironic and tragic. As a result of the rationalizers' control of policy, the only ones who consistently engage in the rational pursuit of their interests, values and aspirations are the jihadists and their state sponsors. For their part, the leaders of the free world seem intent on living out George Orwell's observation that "the quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The Flaws In the Iran Report
By John R. Bolton
Thursday, December 6, 2007; A29
Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the "intelligence community" on issues such as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.Consider these flaws in the NIE's "key judgments," which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout."The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of "intelligence."Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was "possible" but not "likely" that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from -- of all places -- an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that "we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments."That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.John R. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad." He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Thursday, December 6, 2007; A29
Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the "intelligence community" on issues such as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.Consider these flaws in the NIE's "key judgments," which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout."The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of "intelligence."Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was "possible" but not "likely" that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from -- of all places -- an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that "we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments."That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.John R. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad." He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Defa-Matory and Out to Lunch
By Hillel Stavis
Who is J. Lorand Matory and why is he saying those terrible things about Israel and Jews? And why is he “trembling with fear” these days at Harvard University?
Mr. Matory is Professor of Anthropology and of African American and African Studies at Harvard. According to his recent oped in the Harvard Crimson, he “trembles with fear” at the power of the Israel Lobby.
For over 30 years I considered myself an “unofficial” member of the Harvard Community. I founded WordsWorth Books in 1976 and for nearly three decades our bookshop prided itself on serving the Harvard community and welcoming hundreds of authors to speak, regardless of the controversial nature of their writings. In 1989 we were scheduled as the only bookstore in America to host Salman Rushdie just before the death edict was issued against him by the Mullahs of Iran. When the publisher cancelled his appearance for security reasons, we presented a distinguished panel to discuss the state of free speech in the publishing world. We hosted Jimmy Carter twice and Tariq Ali, a voluble critic of Israel. Hardly a week went by without a Harvard graduate walking into WordsWorth thanking us for being a unique venue for ideas or recounting how they had met their future spouse in our Psychology aisle.
WordsWorth was forced to cease operations (like hundreds of other independent bookstores) primarily as a result of the onslaught of Amazon.com and the “big box” stores of Barnes & Noble and Borders.
For nearly twenty years I was a supporter of our local NPR affiliate, WBUR. In the late ‘90s I decided to stop advertising on that station because, in my opinion, the balance and objectivity so often trumpeted by them was absent when it came to one issue: The Arab Israeli conflict. After a number of meetings with the then head of WBUR, Jane Christo and the President of NPR, Kevin Klose, in which I expressed my concerns, I decided to end my relationship with the station. One particular example of the lack of fairness I cited was the complete failure to report on what has often been called “The Forgotten Exodus,” namely, the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands that occurred from 1948 to 1968. Just recently, official Arab documents have been disclosed proving collusion by their governments in the expulsion of Jewish citizens. While NPR had presented scores of stories of Arabs who fled Israel after the 1948 war (it is still a matter of debate whether most fled or were expelled), I claimed that in the network’s 30 year history not one story had been aired concerning the Jewish “forgotten refugees.” I challenged Mr. Klose to find even one story that NPR had aired on this subject. After about three weeks I received an email form him citing an interview with Andre Aciman, a distinguished man of letters and author of the memoir, “Out of Egypt”, that was aired on the Terry Gross show, “Fresh Air”. During the interview, Mr. Aciman remarked that his family had to “leave Egypt” in the 1950’s. Of course, Ms. Gross’s interview did not focus on the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands where they had built thriving communities thousands of years old. Mr. Aciman’s remark was a passing one, a small part of a discussion of his literary oeuvre.
Why am I dredging up this “ancient history” now, you might ask? Well, a few days ago, I decided to spend my lunch hour attending a lecture by Professor Matory, whose recent op ed in The Harvard Crimson stirred up so much controversy. I had never met nor even laid eyes on Professor Matory before his lecture. Imagine my surprise when halfway through his disquisition on Israel and its alleged atrocities against Palestinians, he began talking about me personally, by name, and my decision – more than six years ago - to stop supporting NPR. Professor Matory announced to his audience that I “led a highly damaging donor boycott of WBUR on the grounds that it allegedly broadcast pro-Palestinian points of view too freely.” He made no reference to the substantive and, at the time, published reasons I gave for my withdrawing my support. To my amazement, I was being demonized by the professor for exercising my right not to contribute to certain organizations.
During the Q and A period, I stood up and introduced myself to Professor Matory, who was, understandably, quite chagrined by my presence, seated next to him. I challenged him to provide evidence that I “led a highly damaging donor boycott”. He provided no evidence other than referring to a Boston Globe article which he claimed appeared in 2002. There was indeed an article in The Boston Globe that year, but it simply recounted the picketing of my store by anti-Israel activists.
My decision to stop advertising was a personal one, reluctantly undertaken by what I perceived as a betrayal of NPR’s mandatory and self-proclaimed policy of balance and fairness. I never led a boycott, nor solicited anyone else to stop funding WBUR. As to his charge that exercising my democratic right not to fund organizations I disagreed with amounted to a “highly damaging” campaign, I reminded him that NPR boasts 860 radio outlets in all 50 states, a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars a year and prides itself on reaching more than 25 million listeners a week. The lower end of the FM broadcast spectrum is reserved for NPR from coast to coast and its affiliates receive their federal licenses free of charge. Their demographics reveal their listeners to be in the top 1% of American earners, the elite of American media consumers. NPR is the “establishment” when it comes to the American university community. The notion that a single, independent bookstore can “damage” one of the largest media outlets in the country is ludicrous.
Professor Matory did not stop at slandering only me. He went on to excoriate another independent bookstore, The Harvard Bookstore, for allegedly yielding to pressure from Professor Alan Dershowitz in dis-inviting Norman Finkelstein from appearing there. Yet a casual glance at the Harvard Bookstore’s titles hostile to Israel vs. those supporting Israel will yield an enormous imbalance favoring the former. Nor would The Harvard Book Store agree to carry a book critical of Noam Chomsky; hardly the profile of a business controlled by “The Israel Lobby.”
Just last week, Harvard hosted Noam Chomsky and two passionate pro-Palestinian speakers at the Law School to an overflow crowd of cheering supporters. Rather than "trembling with fear" as Professor Matory puts it, it would seem that his point of view expresses itself whenever and wherever it wants on campus to large, approving audiences.
While decrying the purported “witch hunt” atmosphere on college campuses in general and Harvard, in particular, by “The Israel Lobby” and portraying himself as a victim of a Jewish conspiracy he revealed more than a bit of the paranoid style.
But what is most disturbing about Professor Matory’s apparent obsession with Israel and Jews (at one point he referred to “a moneyed and media connected American Israeli defense force” – I guess we can dispense with the usual coded language observation) is the unavoidable realization that for Professor Matory who was at the epicenter of ousting Larry Summers, Harvard’s President, the Israel and Jewish question was the trigger. It seems clear that for Professor Matory, Summers’ original sin was his opposition to the Harvard divestment - from - Israel campaign expressed long before his (in)famous speech on women in the sciences.
It would seem that Professor Matory has a bad case of Jews-on-the brain. He is beset by Israeli colonizers and their minions on campus: Practitioners of “character assassination, dis-invitation, and other losses of career opportunities campaign contributions, income or friends, and, above all, the damage done by fervent Zionists to the process of intellectual inquiry and debate in this university”. By dis-invitation, he was referring to the wide opposition to the Harvard English Department’s invitation to Tom Paulin, an Irish poet who has called for the murder of all Jewish settlers, including men, women and children (a postition predictably skipped over by the Professor). Continuing his breathless rant he claimed that even his teaching compensation was not off limits for the vaporous cabal: “Even my annual salary is set by officials who appear to feel threatened by my bringing up this issue.”
That a tenured professor so driven by hatred of Israel who sees sinister forces plotting against him at every turn and who spearheaded the successful campaign to unseat Larry Summers speaks volumes about power, not powerlessness. Dr. Johnson famously named “Patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel”. Were he still with us, he might want to substitute the word, “university” for “patriotism.”
Who is J. Lorand Matory and why is he saying those terrible things about Israel and Jews? And why is he “trembling with fear” these days at Harvard University?
Mr. Matory is Professor of Anthropology and of African American and African Studies at Harvard. According to his recent oped in the Harvard Crimson, he “trembles with fear” at the power of the Israel Lobby.
For over 30 years I considered myself an “unofficial” member of the Harvard Community. I founded WordsWorth Books in 1976 and for nearly three decades our bookshop prided itself on serving the Harvard community and welcoming hundreds of authors to speak, regardless of the controversial nature of their writings. In 1989 we were scheduled as the only bookstore in America to host Salman Rushdie just before the death edict was issued against him by the Mullahs of Iran. When the publisher cancelled his appearance for security reasons, we presented a distinguished panel to discuss the state of free speech in the publishing world. We hosted Jimmy Carter twice and Tariq Ali, a voluble critic of Israel. Hardly a week went by without a Harvard graduate walking into WordsWorth thanking us for being a unique venue for ideas or recounting how they had met their future spouse in our Psychology aisle.
WordsWorth was forced to cease operations (like hundreds of other independent bookstores) primarily as a result of the onslaught of Amazon.com and the “big box” stores of Barnes & Noble and Borders.
For nearly twenty years I was a supporter of our local NPR affiliate, WBUR. In the late ‘90s I decided to stop advertising on that station because, in my opinion, the balance and objectivity so often trumpeted by them was absent when it came to one issue: The Arab Israeli conflict. After a number of meetings with the then head of WBUR, Jane Christo and the President of NPR, Kevin Klose, in which I expressed my concerns, I decided to end my relationship with the station. One particular example of the lack of fairness I cited was the complete failure to report on what has often been called “The Forgotten Exodus,” namely, the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands that occurred from 1948 to 1968. Just recently, official Arab documents have been disclosed proving collusion by their governments in the expulsion of Jewish citizens. While NPR had presented scores of stories of Arabs who fled Israel after the 1948 war (it is still a matter of debate whether most fled or were expelled), I claimed that in the network’s 30 year history not one story had been aired concerning the Jewish “forgotten refugees.” I challenged Mr. Klose to find even one story that NPR had aired on this subject. After about three weeks I received an email form him citing an interview with Andre Aciman, a distinguished man of letters and author of the memoir, “Out of Egypt”, that was aired on the Terry Gross show, “Fresh Air”. During the interview, Mr. Aciman remarked that his family had to “leave Egypt” in the 1950’s. Of course, Ms. Gross’s interview did not focus on the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands where they had built thriving communities thousands of years old. Mr. Aciman’s remark was a passing one, a small part of a discussion of his literary oeuvre.
Why am I dredging up this “ancient history” now, you might ask? Well, a few days ago, I decided to spend my lunch hour attending a lecture by Professor Matory, whose recent op ed in The Harvard Crimson stirred up so much controversy. I had never met nor even laid eyes on Professor Matory before his lecture. Imagine my surprise when halfway through his disquisition on Israel and its alleged atrocities against Palestinians, he began talking about me personally, by name, and my decision – more than six years ago - to stop supporting NPR. Professor Matory announced to his audience that I “led a highly damaging donor boycott of WBUR on the grounds that it allegedly broadcast pro-Palestinian points of view too freely.” He made no reference to the substantive and, at the time, published reasons I gave for my withdrawing my support. To my amazement, I was being demonized by the professor for exercising my right not to contribute to certain organizations.
During the Q and A period, I stood up and introduced myself to Professor Matory, who was, understandably, quite chagrined by my presence, seated next to him. I challenged him to provide evidence that I “led a highly damaging donor boycott”. He provided no evidence other than referring to a Boston Globe article which he claimed appeared in 2002. There was indeed an article in The Boston Globe that year, but it simply recounted the picketing of my store by anti-Israel activists.
My decision to stop advertising was a personal one, reluctantly undertaken by what I perceived as a betrayal of NPR’s mandatory and self-proclaimed policy of balance and fairness. I never led a boycott, nor solicited anyone else to stop funding WBUR. As to his charge that exercising my democratic right not to fund organizations I disagreed with amounted to a “highly damaging” campaign, I reminded him that NPR boasts 860 radio outlets in all 50 states, a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars a year and prides itself on reaching more than 25 million listeners a week. The lower end of the FM broadcast spectrum is reserved for NPR from coast to coast and its affiliates receive their federal licenses free of charge. Their demographics reveal their listeners to be in the top 1% of American earners, the elite of American media consumers. NPR is the “establishment” when it comes to the American university community. The notion that a single, independent bookstore can “damage” one of the largest media outlets in the country is ludicrous.
Professor Matory did not stop at slandering only me. He went on to excoriate another independent bookstore, The Harvard Bookstore, for allegedly yielding to pressure from Professor Alan Dershowitz in dis-inviting Norman Finkelstein from appearing there. Yet a casual glance at the Harvard Bookstore’s titles hostile to Israel vs. those supporting Israel will yield an enormous imbalance favoring the former. Nor would The Harvard Book Store agree to carry a book critical of Noam Chomsky; hardly the profile of a business controlled by “The Israel Lobby.”
Just last week, Harvard hosted Noam Chomsky and two passionate pro-Palestinian speakers at the Law School to an overflow crowd of cheering supporters. Rather than "trembling with fear" as Professor Matory puts it, it would seem that his point of view expresses itself whenever and wherever it wants on campus to large, approving audiences.
While decrying the purported “witch hunt” atmosphere on college campuses in general and Harvard, in particular, by “The Israel Lobby” and portraying himself as a victim of a Jewish conspiracy he revealed more than a bit of the paranoid style.
But what is most disturbing about Professor Matory’s apparent obsession with Israel and Jews (at one point he referred to “a moneyed and media connected American Israeli defense force” – I guess we can dispense with the usual coded language observation) is the unavoidable realization that for Professor Matory who was at the epicenter of ousting Larry Summers, Harvard’s President, the Israel and Jewish question was the trigger. It seems clear that for Professor Matory, Summers’ original sin was his opposition to the Harvard divestment - from - Israel campaign expressed long before his (in)famous speech on women in the sciences.
It would seem that Professor Matory has a bad case of Jews-on-the brain. He is beset by Israeli colonizers and their minions on campus: Practitioners of “character assassination, dis-invitation, and other losses of career opportunities campaign contributions, income or friends, and, above all, the damage done by fervent Zionists to the process of intellectual inquiry and debate in this university”. By dis-invitation, he was referring to the wide opposition to the Harvard English Department’s invitation to Tom Paulin, an Irish poet who has called for the murder of all Jewish settlers, including men, women and children (a postition predictably skipped over by the Professor). Continuing his breathless rant he claimed that even his teaching compensation was not off limits for the vaporous cabal: “Even my annual salary is set by officials who appear to feel threatened by my bringing up this issue.”
That a tenured professor so driven by hatred of Israel who sees sinister forces plotting against him at every turn and who spearheaded the successful campaign to unseat Larry Summers speaks volumes about power, not powerlessness. Dr. Johnson famously named “Patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel”. Were he still with us, he might want to substitute the word, “university” for “patriotism.”
Monday, December 3, 2007
Our World: Our friends the Syrians
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST Dec. 3, 2007
Just ahead of Sunday's Duma elections, Russian President Vladimir Putin took yet another step towards ending the post-Cold War thaw in Russia's relations with the West by signing a law suspending Russia's participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Starting next week, Russia will halt NATO countries' inspections and verifications of its military sites and will no longer be obligated to limit the number of its conventional weapons deployed west of the Urals. The signal the move sends former Soviet republics and satellites like Ukraine, Georgia, Poland and Rumania is a chilling one.
Russia's hostility towards the West extends from Europe to the Middle East. During Israel's war with Hizbullah in 2006, Russian military advisors in Syria provided real-time intelligence to both Syria and Hizbullah. Hizbullah's missiles were transferred to the terrorist organization in their original packing from Syria's Ministry of Defense after they arrived from Russia. Since the war, Russia has sold massive amounts of advanced arms to both Syria and Iran. Russian arms continue to comprise the bulwark of Hizbullah's newly replenished missile stocks.
Diplomatically, Russia has acted as Syria's and Iran's shield in the UN Security Council and other international forums. It has placed obstacles on the UN investigation of the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. It has prevented the Security Council from taking any consequential actions against Iran's nuclear weapons program. And it has continued its sponsorship of Iran's nuclear program by maintaining its involvement at the Bushehr nuclear reactor which it built. Just this week, the pro-Iranian IAEA approved Russia's plan to ship nuclear fuel to Bushehr.
IN THE midst of all of this, in their wisdom, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government have decided to accept Russia as the lead mediator in negotiations between Israel and Syria towards an Israeli surrender of the strategically vital Golan Heights.
According to reports in Ma'ariv, Olmert has been conducting secret talks with Assad regarding an Israeli retreat from the Golan Heights through Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Sultanov. At the Annapolis conference last week, those talks - and Russia's central role in promoting them - were brought into the open.
Olmert agreed to Israeli participation in a Russian remake of Annapolis in Moscow in January. There, Syria's demand for an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights will take center stage.
According to the Ma'ariv report, Israeli officials are enthusiastic about Russia's lead role in the talks. While Syria is suspicious of the US, it trusts and respects its Russian defender Putin. By Olmert's lights, this is a good thing.
RUSSIA'S hostility towards the US and Israel and close ties to Israel's primary enemies Syria and Iran make Israel's enthusiastic embrace of Russian mediation with Syria difficult to stomach. Sickening or not, it would make sense if in exchange for Israeli legitimacy, Moscow were to mitigate its bad behavior. But there have been no signs that this has occurred.
Ma'ariv claimed that Olmert's sudden visit to the Kremlin last month was a consequence of developments in Sultanov's shuttle diplomacy.
Perhaps this is true. But coming as it did immediately after Putin returned from his state visit to Iran, where he restated his support for Iran's development of nuclear technology and pledged to complete the Bushehr reactor, Olmert's visit was perceived as an Israeli acceptance of Russia's support for Iran.
There is the off chance that the officials who spoke with Ma'ariv are correct. Perhaps under Russian mediation the Syrians will be more willing to agree to sign an agreement with Israel in which Israel commits itself to handing the Golan Heights over to Damascus than it would be under American mediation. But such an agreement would be a strategic disaster for Israel.
Given the anti-democratic nature of the Russian and the Syrian regimes, it is clear that such an agreement would not include any strong provision for Syrian political liberalization. And since only a liberalization of Syrian politics could cause Damascus to abandon its support for jihad, its strategic alliance with Iran and its development of weapons of mass destruction, it is clear that an accord with Israel would not lead to a decrease in Syrian bellicosity.
Syria's abiding hostility makes the notion of an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights strategically indefensible. Without the Golan, all of northern Israel would be exposed to Syrian forces. And those forces are vastly more powerful today than they were before 1967 when they made life for the Israeli communities beneath the strategic plateau unbearable. Indeed, given Syria's advanced Russian arsenal, it would be all but impossible for Israel to re-conquer the Golan Heights and so win a future war.
IN THE meantime, simply by conducting Russian-mediated negotiations with Syria, the Olmert government is conferring undeserved legitimacy on both Damascus and Moscow. By extension, the government is eroding Israel's regional posture still further.
The Olmert government isn't alone in its embrace of Damascus. The Bush administration is following a pro-Syrian policy of its own, with similarly disastrous results.
Speaking to the New York Times of the administration's decision to invite Syria to last week's Annapolis conference, a senior administration official argued, "Look, a handful in the Arab League were saying they could not attend the conference unless Syria was put on the agenda. So we put Syria on the agenda. What did it cost us? Nothing."
Although perhaps no actual money changed hands, to say that the US paid no price for its decision to invite Syria to participate in the conference is to ignore reality. What Syrian participation at Annapolis cost the US was Lebanon.
Immediately after the conference, the anti-Syrian majority in the Lebanese parliament agreed to support Syria's candidate, General Michel Suleiman as the next Lebanese president to replace Syrian agent, former president Emil Lahoud. As Talal Atrissi, a political analyst at Lebanese University told the Times, "The Syrians did not want to go to Annapolis and without them the conference would have been a failure…. The Syrians traded their participation, which did not cost them anything, with a deal on the Lebanese presidency."
Just ahead of Sunday's Duma elections, Russian President Vladimir Putin took yet another step towards ending the post-Cold War thaw in Russia's relations with the West by signing a law suspending Russia's participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Starting next week, Russia will halt NATO countries' inspections and verifications of its military sites and will no longer be obligated to limit the number of its conventional weapons deployed west of the Urals. The signal the move sends former Soviet republics and satellites like Ukraine, Georgia, Poland and Rumania is a chilling one.
Russia's hostility towards the West extends from Europe to the Middle East. During Israel's war with Hizbullah in 2006, Russian military advisors in Syria provided real-time intelligence to both Syria and Hizbullah. Hizbullah's missiles were transferred to the terrorist organization in their original packing from Syria's Ministry of Defense after they arrived from Russia. Since the war, Russia has sold massive amounts of advanced arms to both Syria and Iran. Russian arms continue to comprise the bulwark of Hizbullah's newly replenished missile stocks.
Diplomatically, Russia has acted as Syria's and Iran's shield in the UN Security Council and other international forums. It has placed obstacles on the UN investigation of the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. It has prevented the Security Council from taking any consequential actions against Iran's nuclear weapons program. And it has continued its sponsorship of Iran's nuclear program by maintaining its involvement at the Bushehr nuclear reactor which it built. Just this week, the pro-Iranian IAEA approved Russia's plan to ship nuclear fuel to Bushehr.
IN THE midst of all of this, in their wisdom, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government have decided to accept Russia as the lead mediator in negotiations between Israel and Syria towards an Israeli surrender of the strategically vital Golan Heights.
According to reports in Ma'ariv, Olmert has been conducting secret talks with Assad regarding an Israeli retreat from the Golan Heights through Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Sultanov. At the Annapolis conference last week, those talks - and Russia's central role in promoting them - were brought into the open.
Olmert agreed to Israeli participation in a Russian remake of Annapolis in Moscow in January. There, Syria's demand for an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights will take center stage.
According to the Ma'ariv report, Israeli officials are enthusiastic about Russia's lead role in the talks. While Syria is suspicious of the US, it trusts and respects its Russian defender Putin. By Olmert's lights, this is a good thing.
RUSSIA'S hostility towards the US and Israel and close ties to Israel's primary enemies Syria and Iran make Israel's enthusiastic embrace of Russian mediation with Syria difficult to stomach. Sickening or not, it would make sense if in exchange for Israeli legitimacy, Moscow were to mitigate its bad behavior. But there have been no signs that this has occurred.
Ma'ariv claimed that Olmert's sudden visit to the Kremlin last month was a consequence of developments in Sultanov's shuttle diplomacy.
Perhaps this is true. But coming as it did immediately after Putin returned from his state visit to Iran, where he restated his support for Iran's development of nuclear technology and pledged to complete the Bushehr reactor, Olmert's visit was perceived as an Israeli acceptance of Russia's support for Iran.
There is the off chance that the officials who spoke with Ma'ariv are correct. Perhaps under Russian mediation the Syrians will be more willing to agree to sign an agreement with Israel in which Israel commits itself to handing the Golan Heights over to Damascus than it would be under American mediation. But such an agreement would be a strategic disaster for Israel.
Given the anti-democratic nature of the Russian and the Syrian regimes, it is clear that such an agreement would not include any strong provision for Syrian political liberalization. And since only a liberalization of Syrian politics could cause Damascus to abandon its support for jihad, its strategic alliance with Iran and its development of weapons of mass destruction, it is clear that an accord with Israel would not lead to a decrease in Syrian bellicosity.
Syria's abiding hostility makes the notion of an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights strategically indefensible. Without the Golan, all of northern Israel would be exposed to Syrian forces. And those forces are vastly more powerful today than they were before 1967 when they made life for the Israeli communities beneath the strategic plateau unbearable. Indeed, given Syria's advanced Russian arsenal, it would be all but impossible for Israel to re-conquer the Golan Heights and so win a future war.
IN THE meantime, simply by conducting Russian-mediated negotiations with Syria, the Olmert government is conferring undeserved legitimacy on both Damascus and Moscow. By extension, the government is eroding Israel's regional posture still further.
The Olmert government isn't alone in its embrace of Damascus. The Bush administration is following a pro-Syrian policy of its own, with similarly disastrous results.
Speaking to the New York Times of the administration's decision to invite Syria to last week's Annapolis conference, a senior administration official argued, "Look, a handful in the Arab League were saying they could not attend the conference unless Syria was put on the agenda. So we put Syria on the agenda. What did it cost us? Nothing."
Although perhaps no actual money changed hands, to say that the US paid no price for its decision to invite Syria to participate in the conference is to ignore reality. What Syrian participation at Annapolis cost the US was Lebanon.
Immediately after the conference, the anti-Syrian majority in the Lebanese parliament agreed to support Syria's candidate, General Michel Suleiman as the next Lebanese president to replace Syrian agent, former president Emil Lahoud. As Talal Atrissi, a political analyst at Lebanese University told the Times, "The Syrians did not want to go to Annapolis and without them the conference would have been a failure…. The Syrians traded their participation, which did not cost them anything, with a deal on the Lebanese presidency."
Saturday, December 1, 2007
The first Christian Zionist
Secret writings by Isaac Newton reveal his views on the Jewish return to Israel
Yaakov Lappin
The world famous 17th-century scientist Isaac Newton, who discovered gravity and revolutionarized mankind's understanding of physics, may also have been the first Christian Zionist, secret writings have revealed.
A new exhibition at the Hebrew University's Jewish National and University Library, Newton's Secrets, which display original writings, drawings, and maps dating back 300 years, reveal startling views held by Newton, which stray far from the scientifically pure image traditionally associated with him.
"Tis said that they who sleep in the dust shall rise again some to reward and some to punishment and Daniel himself in person is named for one of those who shall then rise again. At that time is also predicted the end of the King of the North, the fall of the great apostasy, the return of the Jewish captivity and the great tribulation," reads one letter by Newton.
Other diagrams show sketches of the Jerusalem Temple, which Newton believed would be rebuilt following the Jewish return to Israel.
"This is the secret side to Newton's life. The main reason why this story is so great is because no one could have imagined that Newton would be a believer in biblical prophecy. Now, for the first time, the general public is finding out about what Newton scholars have known for a couple decades," Professor Steven Snobelen, a curator of the exhibition, told Ynetnews.
Snobelen, of King's College in Halifax, Canada, is a passionate student of Newton's theological works, and gave a detailed tour of the scientist's writings on display in Jerusalem.
"Newton believed in prophecy. He thought God controls all of reality, time, and history," he said. "He believed in prophecies in the Old Testament that talked about the Jews' return to Israel… thinking the return would happen past the 17-18 th centuries.
Many Christians thought Jews would all convert to Christianity and that Jerusalem would rebuilt spiritually. Newton has more respect for the Jews, and thought they would return physically," Snobelen added.
The numerous documents produced by Newton on display included Hebrew writing complete with vowel markings. "Newton learned some Hebrew. He would be thrilled to know that his work has been translated into Hebrew and on display in Jerusalem," Snobelen said.
Newton thought the rebuilding of Jerusalem would take place in the late 19th century, and that the Temple would be rebuilt in the 20th or 21st century, Snobelen added. "History has kind of caught up with his predictions," Snobelen said, adding: "If Newton discussed how to put satellites in space and a man on the moon, why should he be wrong about this?"
Newton's radical Protestant theology and belief that a Jewish return to Israel was linked with the return of the Christian deity, Jesus, made him one of the first ever Christian Evangelical-style figures in history, Snobelen said.
Newton also believed that Islam was used by God to punish the corrupt Catholic church, which he likened to "a prostitute."
2060: Apocalypse
Using a time chart, also on display at the exhibition, visitors can see the process of how Newton reached the conclusion that world would end in 2060, in accordance with apocalyptic writings found in the New Testament. The modern Evangelical movement is also known for the importance it attaches to apocalyptic Christian verses.
"He believed in the coming battle of Armageddon and identified the target of the number 666 from the apocalypse," Snobelen said.
"This is a radically different image of Newton than what people think. Scientists are also human beings, and when you go into your laboratory you don't leave your religious beliefs behind," he said.
"Newton didn't see a barrier between science and religion. Some people want to see a barrier, but for Newton only two things existed everywhere: God and gravity," he added.
Yaakov Lappin
The world famous 17th-century scientist Isaac Newton, who discovered gravity and revolutionarized mankind's understanding of physics, may also have been the first Christian Zionist, secret writings have revealed.
A new exhibition at the Hebrew University's Jewish National and University Library, Newton's Secrets, which display original writings, drawings, and maps dating back 300 years, reveal startling views held by Newton, which stray far from the scientifically pure image traditionally associated with him.
"Tis said that they who sleep in the dust shall rise again some to reward and some to punishment and Daniel himself in person is named for one of those who shall then rise again. At that time is also predicted the end of the King of the North, the fall of the great apostasy, the return of the Jewish captivity and the great tribulation," reads one letter by Newton.
Other diagrams show sketches of the Jerusalem Temple, which Newton believed would be rebuilt following the Jewish return to Israel.
"This is the secret side to Newton's life. The main reason why this story is so great is because no one could have imagined that Newton would be a believer in biblical prophecy. Now, for the first time, the general public is finding out about what Newton scholars have known for a couple decades," Professor Steven Snobelen, a curator of the exhibition, told Ynetnews.
Snobelen, of King's College in Halifax, Canada, is a passionate student of Newton's theological works, and gave a detailed tour of the scientist's writings on display in Jerusalem.
"Newton believed in prophecy. He thought God controls all of reality, time, and history," he said. "He believed in prophecies in the Old Testament that talked about the Jews' return to Israel… thinking the return would happen past the 17-18 th centuries.
Many Christians thought Jews would all convert to Christianity and that Jerusalem would rebuilt spiritually. Newton has more respect for the Jews, and thought they would return physically," Snobelen added.
The numerous documents produced by Newton on display included Hebrew writing complete with vowel markings. "Newton learned some Hebrew. He would be thrilled to know that his work has been translated into Hebrew and on display in Jerusalem," Snobelen said.
Newton thought the rebuilding of Jerusalem would take place in the late 19th century, and that the Temple would be rebuilt in the 20th or 21st century, Snobelen added. "History has kind of caught up with his predictions," Snobelen said, adding: "If Newton discussed how to put satellites in space and a man on the moon, why should he be wrong about this?"
Newton's radical Protestant theology and belief that a Jewish return to Israel was linked with the return of the Christian deity, Jesus, made him one of the first ever Christian Evangelical-style figures in history, Snobelen said.
Newton also believed that Islam was used by God to punish the corrupt Catholic church, which he likened to "a prostitute."
2060: Apocalypse
Using a time chart, also on display at the exhibition, visitors can see the process of how Newton reached the conclusion that world would end in 2060, in accordance with apocalyptic writings found in the New Testament. The modern Evangelical movement is also known for the importance it attaches to apocalyptic Christian verses.
"He believed in the coming battle of Armageddon and identified the target of the number 666 from the apocalypse," Snobelen said.
"This is a radically different image of Newton than what people think. Scientists are also human beings, and when you go into your laboratory you don't leave your religious beliefs behind," he said.
"Newton didn't see a barrier between science and religion. Some people want to see a barrier, but for Newton only two things existed everywhere: God and gravity," he added.
What am I Doing Here?
by Zvi Koenigsberg
When a friend told me about CJUI, my immediate instinct (and action) was to join this group and do what I can to help.This, despite the fact that I generally tend to shy away from collective activities. What, then, was different in this case?
What drew me to CJUI is that, for the first time in my experience, there is an unequivocal voice which does not fear to speak the truth, unfettered by the chains of political correctness.This voice rings loud and clear about the cultural, religious, economic, and - last but not least - military struggle the Western world is waging today rather unsuccessfully against the forces of Islam.
The most vital part of solving a problem involves identifying it correctly. Twenty five years of living in Israel and being part and parcel of the struggle on an almost daily basis brought me to an understanding of this dilemma. But even in Israel, whose inhabitants are victim to countless acts of random Arab and Islamic violence and terror, not all understand the nature of what we are facing. This refusal to look reality in the face is magnified tenfold in the U.S., particularly in the mother of all red states, the People's Republic of Massachusetts.
The facts are spelled out very clearly in the blog www.solomonia.com: the city of Boston literally gave away valuable city property for the purpose of building the largest mosque in the Northeast. This, despite the fact that the bulk of the monies came from Saudi sources, the center of all Islamic extremism.... and despite the fact that the majority of the mosque's founders have been found to be either terrorists themselves, or closely linked to terror.
Joining CJUI is the least I could do to counteract the inexplicable complacency of my surroundings in the face of the greatest threat we have ever known to our way of life, a threat which uses our democratic principles and court systems against us much as it used our airplanes .
And this is a threat that fights us on many different levels. For almost three decades, I have been engaged in historical research which deals primarily with the centuries that preceded the Israelite kingdoms,(1300-1000 BCE). I was part of a team that found very strong evidence of the existence of the people of Israel in the land of Israel as early as 1250 BCE. Further we found that the Israelites had by that time developed their cult to a degree that made it recognizably distinct from other peoples of that period. More on this at my website www.thelosttemple.com.Through every step of that research, I encountered the strong resistance of the Moslem world to the fact that the Jews of today and their Bible are connected to the ancient Israelites. Ironically, the Israelites actually did exist in precisely those areas the Moslems claim as their own.
This resistance was recently highlighted by the tenure issue at Columbia University surrounding Nadia Abu El Haj. Again, Solomonia.com provides a valuable source of details on this. The bottom line is that a venerable institution is on the verge of granting tenure to a professor whose work is based not on science, but on the political rantings of an anti-Semitic cult-like movement emanating from two strange bedfellows: the extreme Left, who hate Israel with a passion, and the Moslem world, especially its Arab grouping, which shares this sentiment, and indeed acts upon it at every possible opportunity.
To counter this evil, our organization reaches out to those who share our Culture of Life, unlike our enemies, who revere a Culture of Death. The most outspoken support Israel has received is from Christians who are able to understand the struggles Israel faces. Our Christian and Jewish members share a sanctification of life and recognize the right of Israel, as a people, to prosper and flourish in Israel and elsewhere. This right was recognized by George Washington in an eloquent letter to the Jewish community of Rhode Island. Sadly, this understanding has been eroded in much of American academia, where Israel has been turned into a pariah by the lies and misrepresentations of the Left and the Arabs.
The Christians and Jews who belong to CJUI, however, are doing it not only for the sake of Israel. They are perceptive enough to realize that the difficulties that Israel faces are the difficulties that all good people around the world face, including those few brave Moslem souls who have been courageous enough to speak out against the extremes of Islam.
This is a war that must be fought on many fronts. My days as a reserve soldier in the Israeli army are over. But I can and wish to contribute on the front of ideas, especially those dealing with the recognition that the right of Israel to exist are based on a narrative that has much historical merit to it, a heritage that has laid the foundations for the Culture of Life common to Christians and Jews.
When a friend told me about CJUI, my immediate instinct (and action) was to join this group and do what I can to help.This, despite the fact that I generally tend to shy away from collective activities. What, then, was different in this case?
What drew me to CJUI is that, for the first time in my experience, there is an unequivocal voice which does not fear to speak the truth, unfettered by the chains of political correctness.This voice rings loud and clear about the cultural, religious, economic, and - last but not least - military struggle the Western world is waging today rather unsuccessfully against the forces of Islam.
The most vital part of solving a problem involves identifying it correctly. Twenty five years of living in Israel and being part and parcel of the struggle on an almost daily basis brought me to an understanding of this dilemma. But even in Israel, whose inhabitants are victim to countless acts of random Arab and Islamic violence and terror, not all understand the nature of what we are facing. This refusal to look reality in the face is magnified tenfold in the U.S., particularly in the mother of all red states, the People's Republic of Massachusetts.
The facts are spelled out very clearly in the blog www.solomonia.com: the city of Boston literally gave away valuable city property for the purpose of building the largest mosque in the Northeast. This, despite the fact that the bulk of the monies came from Saudi sources, the center of all Islamic extremism.... and despite the fact that the majority of the mosque's founders have been found to be either terrorists themselves, or closely linked to terror.
Joining CJUI is the least I could do to counteract the inexplicable complacency of my surroundings in the face of the greatest threat we have ever known to our way of life, a threat which uses our democratic principles and court systems against us much as it used our airplanes .
And this is a threat that fights us on many different levels. For almost three decades, I have been engaged in historical research which deals primarily with the centuries that preceded the Israelite kingdoms,(1300-1000 BCE). I was part of a team that found very strong evidence of the existence of the people of Israel in the land of Israel as early as 1250 BCE. Further we found that the Israelites had by that time developed their cult to a degree that made it recognizably distinct from other peoples of that period. More on this at my website www.thelosttemple.com.Through every step of that research, I encountered the strong resistance of the Moslem world to the fact that the Jews of today and their Bible are connected to the ancient Israelites. Ironically, the Israelites actually did exist in precisely those areas the Moslems claim as their own.
This resistance was recently highlighted by the tenure issue at Columbia University surrounding Nadia Abu El Haj. Again, Solomonia.com provides a valuable source of details on this. The bottom line is that a venerable institution is on the verge of granting tenure to a professor whose work is based not on science, but on the political rantings of an anti-Semitic cult-like movement emanating from two strange bedfellows: the extreme Left, who hate Israel with a passion, and the Moslem world, especially its Arab grouping, which shares this sentiment, and indeed acts upon it at every possible opportunity.
To counter this evil, our organization reaches out to those who share our Culture of Life, unlike our enemies, who revere a Culture of Death. The most outspoken support Israel has received is from Christians who are able to understand the struggles Israel faces. Our Christian and Jewish members share a sanctification of life and recognize the right of Israel, as a people, to prosper and flourish in Israel and elsewhere. This right was recognized by George Washington in an eloquent letter to the Jewish community of Rhode Island. Sadly, this understanding has been eroded in much of American academia, where Israel has been turned into a pariah by the lies and misrepresentations of the Left and the Arabs.
The Christians and Jews who belong to CJUI, however, are doing it not only for the sake of Israel. They are perceptive enough to realize that the difficulties that Israel faces are the difficulties that all good people around the world face, including those few brave Moslem souls who have been courageous enough to speak out against the extremes of Islam.
This is a war that must be fought on many fronts. My days as a reserve soldier in the Israeli army are over. But I can and wish to contribute on the front of ideas, especially those dealing with the recognition that the right of Israel to exist are based on a narrative that has much historical merit to it, a heritage that has laid the foundations for the Culture of Life common to Christians and Jews.
Comfort My People
The first Comfort My People gathering was December 2002 and was the result of Christian Renewal Church and Temple Shalom in Salem, Massachusetts extending hands of friendship toward another with the initial purpose to support Israel in the midst of the Intifada. It seemed as a miracle was developing between faith, race and gender that evening and the local newspaper coined the term, "The Bridge over Lafayette Street," as both congregations stood opposite one another on this street. During that first service the rabbi taught of the little known day of remembrance and fasting that had occurred just the day before, the tenth of Tevet, which marked the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and to which Isaiah wrote, "Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the LORD's hand double for all her sins."
We were all in awe to learn that to almost the day, separated by millennia, we were confirming the words spoken by G-d through the prophet Isaiah. And so the miracle has continued over the past five years with seven Comfort My People events occurring to date. While we have hosted local and international speakers and dignitaries, we recognize that the true miracle happens on a the personal level, where we as Jew and Christian begin to get to know each other, ask questions of one another and begin to stand confidently beside one another, especially as we seem to be facing rising opposition to biblical and democratic values we embrace for not only Israel, but for the United States as well.
With the goal of strengthening relationships between Jews and Christians, Temple Shalom and Christian Renewal Church will be hosting, Jews and Christians: A Journey Of Faith. On each evening of November 6th and 13th we will watch half of the movie, followed with table discussion of what was just seen. Please plan to join us these two nights. For more details, call Denette Abers at 978-374-6429.
http://www.comfortmypeople.org/#
We were all in awe to learn that to almost the day, separated by millennia, we were confirming the words spoken by G-d through the prophet Isaiah. And so the miracle has continued over the past five years with seven Comfort My People events occurring to date. While we have hosted local and international speakers and dignitaries, we recognize that the true miracle happens on a the personal level, where we as Jew and Christian begin to get to know each other, ask questions of one another and begin to stand confidently beside one another, especially as we seem to be facing rising opposition to biblical and democratic values we embrace for not only Israel, but for the United States as well.
With the goal of strengthening relationships between Jews and Christians, Temple Shalom and Christian Renewal Church will be hosting, Jews and Christians: A Journey Of Faith. On each evening of November 6th and 13th we will watch half of the movie, followed with table discussion of what was just seen. Please plan to join us these two nights. For more details, call Denette Abers at 978-374-6429.
http://www.comfortmypeople.org/#
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